TIMBERMAN ON WHERE A BRITISH TV CLASSIC WENT WRONG

As another great season of ten perfectly-crafted episodes of The Bridge (yet another great Scandinoir) ends, leaving Saga in the rain with great responsibility on her shoulders, and some life lessons still to be learned, Eyewear welcomes this reflection by brilliant American writer Steven Timberman on Sherlock’s strange, surreal, and
off-putting third series.

BBC’s
Sherlock reimagining has always been an odd duckling. In it’s first two series
Moffat and his team created a Sherlock Holmes that slotted nicely between
complete fealty to the source material and entirely abandoning the spirit of
the original stories. Moffat’s Sherlock stood out – both from the original
stories and the endless imitators currently clogging up the television. And
then Sherlock took two years off. Cumberbatch became Assange and Khan, Freeman
went to Middle Earth, and Moffat hopped in the TARDIS for a while.

After
watching Sherlock’s first three episodes in two years, I felt discombobulated.
There was still plenty of banter between Sherlock and Watson, the show still
indulged in a mystery or two, with dollops of the efficient character work that
Moffat has built a career off of. Yet the feeling I had was the same gnawing
sense of unease that welcomed me after watching Arrested Development return
after a seven year absence. Like the end of Quantum Leap, Sherlock never
returned home.

Over in the states, there’s plenty of envy
for the British Television model. It offers a flexibility that the American
system has never had – actors are free to pursue passion projects and the
writers don’t have to fill every season with countless episodes that do little
more than maintain the status quo. But Sherlock isn’t really a television
series. In raw minutes, three 90 minute episodes feels substantial. But there’s
only room for three storylines, three plots – and no room to establish
stability before tearing it all down.

In Sherlock’s first years, Moffat’s
plotting felt restrained. Each season devoted the second episode to a fun
little lark of an adventure – battling a Chinese acrobat crime syndicate (the
less said about the racial implications, the better) or stumbling into a fun
riff on horror stories. By contrast, this series tries to cover an ungodly
amount of emotional ground, leaving us feeling like we’re perpetually five
minutes late to a party.

The first episode functions as a ninety
minute treatise on Sherlock and Watson’s companionship, but is largely consumed
by the “mystery” surrounding Sherlock’s return. 90% of telling a good
television story comes down to pacing, knowing when to tease and when to
deliver. Leaving fans to obsess over Sherlock’s faked death for over two years
meant that there was no answer that could possibly satisfy those with even a
passing interest in the resolution. Instead of getting to the underwhelming answer,
though, the script teases the viewer for eighty minutes. Characters dream of
solutions involving British celebrities and slash fiction – all of which takes
away from the present-day drama of Sherlock’s return. And when the answer is
revealed, it’s done in an ambiguous handwave that cheapens everything that went
before.

Look,
there’s no way to accurately portray a detailed step-by-step battle of wits
between Sherlock and Moriarity. Their very cleverness means that we’ll never
entirely be in on the secret. But we should occasionally be invited into the
parlor, and shown a small scintilla of how Sherlock’s mind works. Every glimpse
we received these past three episodes has felt obligatory at best. Sherlock
used to be a show about two guys solving crimes together. Now it’s a show about
Sherlock and Watson’s relationship – and we’re lucky if the script occasionally
remembers to give us even the ornamental trappings of a mystery. The first
episode’s actual “mystery” involving the Underground demands Sherlock take
fifty minutes to realize that an entire train car is missing; the sort of
reveal that even the drunkest homicide detective could catch.

For example, the second episode attempts to
marry a smattering of actual crimesolving with Watson’s wedding. But instead of
simply telling the story in straight chronological order, the script bounces us
to and fro like an overly pushy amusement ride. “Look!” it screams. “Sherlock’s
theme in dubstep!” “A mystery that manages to be both convoluted and entirely
too basic!” Thrown weakly into an endless best man speech that feels like it
goes on for decades, the whole episode feels gimmicky. Mucking with chronology
only works if the writer has a damn good reason for it – if the entire point of
the story hinges on the unorthodox structure. Writers can get away with the
occasional stylistic flourish in a movie script, because movie’s largely don’t
build on top of one another. But when each episode of Sherlock is meant to
click together like a lego set, ambiguity and stylistic wankery does nothing
but remind the viewer that they’re sitting in front of their television sets
watching increasingly implausible doses of Moffat’s storybook London.

Roger Ebert repeatedly mentioned that every
good movie has to pass the “refrigerator test.” It’s okay for a movie not to
make much sense; with enough time a devoted fan can pick apart even the most
ornate of scripts. A movie’s plot holes should only start to dawn on you after
the movie is over and you’re grabbing a beer from the fridge. Sherlock’s final
episode utterly fails this test. The script attempts to link together the few
scraps of foreshadowing in the two previous episodes with all the grace of a
drunk Sherlock Holmes. I once had a writing teacher tell us that all we had to
do was stay true to our characters. And in Sherlock’s final episode, Watson
certainly acts in character. But just because you can tell a “Watson marries a
CIA assassin” story doesn’t make it a story worth telling. It is one twist too
many, the equivalent of listening to a writer pitch his story and constantly
saying “But wait, there’s more!”

The shame is that on a scene-by-scene
level, it is a satisfying entry. Martin Freeman plays the hell out of Watson’s
anguish, and we’re given an extended look at Sherlock’s psyche. But it all
feels too far gone, too much of a (yes, again) gimmick. We’re introduced to
Mary, than we see her at her wedding, than she’s suddenly an assassin but wait
she really loves Watson but wait she might not but what if she’s…. it’s all storm
and thunder without any time to take in the rain.

And to top off the highly experimental set
of episodes, Moffat and his crew indulge in non-linear storytelling yet again.
The middle section is an utter mess of well-written scenes crashing and
cascading into one another, as if the writers pressed the “randomize” button
for no reason. The strangeness concludes with perhaps the most controversial
moment of their entire series. Sherlock decides to outwit Magnusson by…
bringing a gun into his highly fortified fortress and shooting him with it.
It’s pure Indiana Jones, but feels incredibly jarring. The writing tries to
play it off as a “Sherlock isn’t a hero” moment, but it instead feels like the
show has ran out of ideas. Zach Snyder’s awful Man of Steel made a similar
mistake; our heroes of yesterday should be brought into the modern world with
flair – but not with the added infantile notion that murder somehow makes them
more complex.Shooting your enemy in the
head isn’t a victory; it’s cowardice.

For all of the above, Sherlock may still be
worth a Recommendation. The performances remain impressive, and the
impressionistic directing style is at least unique. But languid individual
episodes hurriedly stitched together to give the illusion of a plan do not make
for a satisfying whole.

It all feels too much for the sake of being
too little.

Steven Timberman is a Californian who has spent the last decade travelling. Along the way he's managed to pick up two creative writing degrees. Recently graduated, Steven continues to flit about, with active projects including a novella set in London and a political thriller TV pilot. You can see more of his work at GenerationChiChi.blogspot.com